• Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Introduction
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    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
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    • Chapter 9
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    • Eglinton Hill
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    • in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …
    • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters]
    • Miller’s Batman
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mlewisredford

~ may the Supreme and Precious Jewel Bodhichitta take birth where it has not yet done so …

mlewisredford

Tag Archives: performance management

new blue porsche

12 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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2018, 5*, blue, cleaning, ducks-in-a-circle, investment, management, managerialism, performance management, public service, quiet, reform, results-led education, silence, speech, teacher, teaching, vacuum-cleaner

                one day
                some poor bastard
                got handed a broom
                and was told to
                clean the place up

                but I’m a teacher
                he said no you’re
                a janitor but we’ll
                pay you well if you
                keep it clean and quiet

                so he pushed some dust
                around and lo when
                he turned round it was
                there behind him
                so he invested in a

                state-of-some-bastard-
                industry vacuum-cleaner
                sucked up everything
                that wasn’t bolted
                down, whirling around

                in the drum all in the
                same direction and then
                switched the power
                off; everything was
                quiet and squeaky clean

                and all the right colours
                and he wondered at the
                eiree silence but not
                for long as he drove about
                in his new blue porsche

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

blue wormhole: I don’t need to go out / onto the balcony to see behind me / to know what’s going on
management & performance management & teaching wormhole: someone’s got to do it
managerialism wormhole: I turn to wake up
results-led education wormhole: what wounds have you got?
silence wormhole: fifty-eight // and silent prayers
speech wormhole: presence

 

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someone’s got to do it

07 Tuesday Aug 2018

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

2*, 2018, bankers, bullying, management, performance management, public service, retirement, shoulders, teaching

                you didn’t manage me
                you just tried to shove me

                to where you needed me to be
                to get your next pay rise

                while shrugging shoulders
                and blaming the bankers claiming

                someone’s got to do it

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

management wormhole: listen willya
performance management wormhole: Teaching career: much like Monet’s ‘Impression: soleil levant’ or, in the long run, de Chirico’s ‘The Red Tower’ — Private
retirement wormhole: so / do I keep on writing now I’ve retired, or … / Rumplestiltskin
teaching wormhole: so where have I got:

 

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the ancient tree

15 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by m lewis redford in poems, teaching

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2012, birds, branches, crows, education, educational behaviourism, magpies, measure, performance management, time, trunk, value-bled education

 

 

 

                      once upon a quarter century
                      the beat and heart of teaching
                           thousands of birds
                           through all time
                           come to the ancient tree
                      was quantified immeasurably
                      inverse to a fading quality
                           generations now of
                           magpies and crows
                           who bring dispute
                           and change and sit
                           in the tree making
                           loud noises
                      all the better to make the numbers rise and fall my dear
                      consistency and behaviour to within an inch of its life
                           droppings in the branches
                           droppings down the trunk

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

birds wormhole: Jon
branches wormhole: like ink – poewieview #23
crows wormhole: ‘in the midst of winter …’
education wormhole: new year’s eve 2014; train up to London to / walk the bridges across the Thames, and / listen to the voices say it is, and was, like, / but get back home before the fireworks / obliterate it all in the emptying twilight
performance management wormhole: the MagOO Effect Effect
time wormhole: Doctor Strange I – the trashcan tilted the better to see now the street

 

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the MagOO Effect Effect

04 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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2016, Big Picture, breakdown, career, cartoon, communication, conversation, CPD, detail, discussion, eyes, feedback, humour, identity, looking, management, Mr Magoo, observation, performance management, professional development, seeing, teaching

 

 

mr magoo

 

                                              the Magoo Effect

                when Management observe, they are All Eyes but only see
                                what you say
                                if it runs across a grid –
                                              they think they are doing sudoku –

                if they see what they think they see ‘Good, Good’
                                if they don’t see what you show them ‘Satisfactory’
                                              and no discussion
                                              – they saw it! –

                all the while mumbling about the Big Picture, they just
                                bump into things and have
                                              meaningful conversations with them
                                              which is gruellingly funny
                                              but never personal

C – o – n – t – i – n – u – i – n – g     P – r – o – f – e – s – s – i – o – n – a – l     D – e – v – e – l – o – p – m – e – n – t       

                                              looks me straight in the eye –
                myself and my work all open and akimbo on the desk – and says
                                let us observe you to see what you have
                                              to offer; creeped-out
                                              I still cannot recognise
                                              the development in all
                                              this performance
                                              I have to make:

                                the Magoo Effect

                                mistaking
                the apparent for the actual through seeing
                                selective detail

                                Performance Management
                is to Magoo the communication of teaching
                                into a cartoon

                get your eyes off my residuals

                                you’re embarrassing me

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

breakdown wormhole: I survived
career wormhole: … anymore
communication & seeing wormhole: poessay X: soul love – poewieview #2
eyes wormhole: bookmark
looking wormhole: finding my own true nature – Plumstead, Woolwich, 190915
identity & management wormhole: development
performance management wormhole: what I am about to say is true / what I just said was a lie
teaching wormhole: bamboo-green boiled sweet / with soft purple filling

 

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what I am about to say is true / what I just said was a lie

02 Friday May 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

2012, 5*, anxiety, career, CPD, identity, managerialism, offer, performance, performance management, Principal, professional development, results-led education, stress, teaching, time

 

 

 

                      what I am about to say is true
                      what I just said was a lie

                      when you spent
                      eleven years being
                      too busy deciding and
                      leading my career
                      to consider what
                      I had offered
                      even while you
                      were asking of me
                      what I had to offer
                      you created an
                      anxiety in my
                      practice which
                      couldn’t be resolved
                      unless I ignored myself

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

anxiety wormhole: on
career wormhole: just saying, is all – III
identity wormhole: silent crash // … / after all
managerialism wormhole: my life is not your market
performance management wormhole: the Lamp
results-led education wormhole: something simple to offer
teaching wormhole: fractured –
time wormhole: deepening with each step

 

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the Lamp

09 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in teaching

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accountability, assessment for learning, communication, curriculum, learning, management, managerialism, National Curriculum, performance, performance management, politics, professional development, professionalism, resource, responsibility, syllabus, teaching craft

Since 1988 the government has been ‘reforming’ education: to make provision and attainment nationally uniform and transparent equally for the government, schools, employers, parents, teachers and, yes, pupils.   Since 1997 the government has ‘managerialised’ education: it has dismantled the semi-autonomous remit of the teacher to practise h/er vocation, it has redefined ‘professionalism’ away from vocation and value and into process and productivity in the name of ‘accountability’, and it has quantified this process and productivity and called it ‘professional development’ (soon to be ‘licensed’).   This has left teachers estranged from, and distrustful of, the very dynamic that makes teaching happen: the skilful, adaptive, speculative, compensatory, dancing, alternative, bargaining, creative, tentative, controlling, releasing, playing, explorative, human dialectic of communication between teacher and pupil.

How is this ‘reform’, this ‘professionalism’, experienced?*   The National Curriculum has been defined – and is periodically juggled with – into core/foundation/statutory subjects, clearly and simply, so that they could be listed in a pamphlet.   Very quickly these subjects became disseminated out into national/local/exam-board subject syllabi – what needed to be ‘covered’ in each subject, especially when the need to level/grade the content became compulsory as well as statutory (‘so amusing how the syllabi, at this point, became known as ‘specifications’ rather than syllabi).   When the syllabi arrived in schools they had to be managed into a fit state to enter the classroom, so they had to be disseminated again (perhaps, better, ‘dissected’), (or even ‘disembowelled’).   Each syllabus topic to be broken down into differentiated tasks, mapped cross-curricular-ly, and All/Most/Some’d.   The fragmentation going on from the simple National Curriculum to the classroom has been almost exponential.   What was simple at the essential level (government) became overwhelmingly complicated at the practical level (classroom) – it was pamphlet-able at the government level, it became incommunicable, unlearnable, at the classroom level.

* We were having a nice game of football one day.   As with all games there were hard bits, exhausting bits, unfair bits, but we were holding a 1-1 draw.   Then – while we were playing – there were new rules to the game introduced.   The goalposts were left where they were, actually, but we now had to move the ball around the field …on a trolley!   We all had to have trolleys ready for when we had possession of the ball.   The trolleys were fitted with directional wheels to aid mobility around the field, baskets to hold the ball, racks to hold the football boots that we’d need when we had to pass the ball, shoot or defend a negotiated tackle.   We were told, ‘We have given you all this equipment.   In return we want a fast, exciting, entertaining game.’   So we pushed these trolleys around the field.   The wheels mostly got stuck.   The ball usually fell out of the basket.   No one scored any goals.

The pupil thereby received curricula which were overwhelmingly broad and complicated.   They received them in restricted amounts of time (in an ever-squeezed timetable with up to fourteen different subjects including drives on technology, IT, Citizenship alongside the drives within the Big Three subjects) which, even for the most able, required them to develop guerrilla tactics to learn – in, learn-something, get out, next.   The pupil has lost the sense of studying (exploring, wondering … mastering) a subject, it now just receives – it consumes.     The pupil has become passive, incapable of developing h/er skills of independent study – not enough time for it (or rather, not enough perspective to develop any motive other than ‘getting’ it).   The pupils have become overwhelmed, even, with the simple ‘getting’ of education: overwhelmed by content, they have no perspective, or will, to link their knowledge together (to ‘stand under’ their studies to see how they all fit together), and they will become satisfied with a factual-based appreciation of their subjects at best (making A-level teachers scratch their heads at times wondering why on earth some pupils chose their subject).   At worst they will ‘can’t be bothered’ with it all because there is more to be gained in self-esteem by publically rejecting it all rather than the impossibility of trying to master it.

For the teacher: s/he might have been able to rationalise and deliver the disseminated monster that education has become, but it was decided that teachers are fundamentally a-qualified to do the job (certainly, any profession which strikes over pay in the early 80’s needs to be sorted out)!   The nobility of the teacher has therefore been systematically (and publically) dismantled.   Professionalism has been re-defined by questioning the received image of teacher as authority-by-role (both in discipline and knowledge), and even questioning the ‘semi-autonomous professional’, by infiltrating the hallowed ground of the classroom to ensure … measurability of what they do.   ‘Measurability’ of what the teacher does is now quantitative: by input (the production of the paperwork for the lesson which proves that it was planned, what can be seen to be ‘in’ the lesson to be ticked off), and output (professional development is now linked to a performance which is measured statistically – there is so much that needs to be ‘reduced’ and screened out of consideration to make a statistic measurable – even pay is now linked to that same extracted performance).   Teachers are no longer respected but are now accountable (as well as ‘accounted’) to their Head of Department, their Head of Year, their Senior Management team, their School Governors, parents, the government, the public…   The overwhelming proportion of a teacher’s energy has now to be focussed on making sure that they are justified to all parties, before they can start to communicate.   Teachers are now taxed by needing to manage their curricula fit for process and attainment (managing ‘within’) in response to a pervasive management from ‘outside’.   The management of courses has become more important than their delivery.   It is difficult for these courses to be coherent or stepped; it is easy for them to be overwhelming for both teachers to deliver and pupils to receive.   In the past some teachers were inspirational because they could provide the portal to the world of their subject by skill of communication – they knew, through their teaching, what the seed of the subject was that drew a child’s eye.   Now most teachers have a ‘seed catalogue’ and no ‘field’ in which to sow.   Teachers have been ‘accountability’d’ and ‘consistency’d’ out of their skill of communication – out of the skill of drawing the child’s eye – by having to focus on the (measurable) process of teaching rather than the communication of teaching.   Communication has become a rather indulgent distraction in the face of ‘hard’ realities like (selective) statistical results, finance, the school’s PR with parents.    Teachers are left actively paralysed in having to meet impossibly (impractically, needlessly) wide and widening curriculum and (summative) performance indicators.^

                                       ^
                                       The centipede was happy quite
                                       Until the toad, in fun
                                       Said, ‘pray, which leg moves after which?’
                                       This raised her doubts to such a pitch
                                       She fell distracted in the ditch
                                       Not knowing how to run.
                                                     – Marion Quinlan Davis

So how is Assessment for Learning a solution to the atrophying of teacher professionalism?   So many curricular and cross-curricular teaching schemes have been floated during the last twenty years that have shown that attainment (no matter how you measure it) is not affected.   It was necessary to look at the learning in education as much as the teaching.   It has emerged that Assessment for Learning is the mechanism which links the teaching (delivered) to the learning (received) and still enable the measurability so desperately needed (needed, needed) when education has become the political potato that it has.   How does it connect teaching with learning?   It provides a template through which topics can be taught and learnt using the same language.   Topics are delivered broken down into levels 3-8 or grades E-A* and pupils apprehend them at whatever level/grade they can develop.   Both teachers and pupils understand the language of levels 3-8 or grades E-A*.   The skill of the teacher is in providing the ‘field’ of endeavour, the work of the pupil is to cultivate 3-8/E-A* as far as they can.   This co-working, through a commonly understood language and purpose, is called a dialectic; the working of this dialectic is called … teaching and learning.   Assessment for Learning enables that dialectic so that the power to teach and learn can be returned back to their rightful owners.   When Assessment for Learning happens the whole of the edifice which has become education becomes workable rather than impossible – education becomes what it always should have been, an enlightenment.

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

communication & performance management & professionalism & teaching craft wormhole: I don’t think I could do it anymore
learning wormhole: across the room / through the patio doors / through the conservatory windows / at the bottom of the garden / the still bifurcated trunk of / the oak / before the let-grown hair and fringes / of the fir tree / blown every lifetime in a while by the winter sun // actually
management wormhole: Teaching career: much like Monet’s ‘Impression: soleil levant’
politics wormhole: The Future of Teaching: performance or capability (‘oh, not ‘teaching’ then?’)

 

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I don’t think I could do it anymore

18 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

2012, 6*, bureaucracy, career, communication, creativity, disempowerment, expectation, identity, managerialism, performance management, professionalism, question, recognition, resource, teaching, teaching craft, voices

 

 

 

                                              why
                do you ignore what I think
                                then tell me how to construct

                                              why
                do you ignore what I have constructed
                                then tell me how to communicate

                                              why
                do you ignore what I have cognitively modelled
                                then tell me how to be professional

                                              why
                do you ignore the craft of my plan and resource
                                then expect the art of communication

                                              how
                do you ignore the presence of what I think and create
                                then tell me that I am valued

                                              how
                can you work in education
                                and not see the psychology of what you wreak

                                              so
                tell me Principal Principle are you never tempted to get back into the classroom
                                ‘no, I don’t think I could do it anymore’

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

career & teaching wormhole: the Big Stage
communication & performance management & recognition wormhole: Teaching career: much like Monet’s ‘Impression: soleil levant’
creativity wormhole: as they wish
disempowerment wormhole: Resource
identity & voices wormhole: in verse / question / m a r k ?
managerialism wormhole; teaching: which is it going to be, procedure or nurture?
professionalism & teaching craft wormhole: The Future of Teaching: performance or capability (‘oh, not ‘teaching’ then?’)

 

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The Future of Teaching: performance or capability (‘oh, not ‘teaching’ then?’)

09 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in teaching

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Academy status, capability, career, compromise, consultation, government, money, obligation, performance, performance management, politics, professional development, professionalism, recognition, slogans, teaching art, teaching craft

Preface: the UK government is driving all sorts of misery right through the art of living in the name of preparing national life for the future and responding to The Economic Situation That We All Find Ourselves In!!!   Nowhere more so than in public service, and most keenly felt by myself in Education, where the reform seems to be aimed at disenfranchising the professional teacher from the very exercise of their own skill: teaching.   Schools are being put in a position whereby they have become reliant on providing an education service which can only run on various extra fundings (erstwhile specialisms); the fundings have now disappeared – ‘wail, what can we do?’ – and ‘never fear, we offer you … Academies’.   With what seems a lot of money – we were made an offer we couldn’t refuse.   However, legally, these Academies have now haemorrhaged from local authority control – big saving of money.   Management of Academies has devolved to the Academies themselves.   “Freedom,” bannered our school when it became an Academy at the beginning of this year (‘aha,’ I thought ‘this could be creative’) “… to all think along the same lines” (‘wail’).   Towards the end of this year the government has made proposals that Performance Management (through which a teacher is targeted and measured how well they do their job) and Capability Procedures (through which a teacher goes if their work is perceived as inadequate) should be grafted together into one procedure.   Our Review would henceforth start with the check to see if we are still capable, and that if there is the slightest question over any aspect of our performance our review would suddenly become a struggle for our jobs.   Our Academy would like to take this up.   We have a period of consultation.   The following is what I offered to the discussion:

Of course the government document highlights and emphasises that grafting performance management and capability is the way forward in management of teachers.   The ‘way’ ‘forward’ is to streamline the teaching workforce into a unified cadre of Education Deliverers and the only way to do this is to nullify teacher thought and experience – the very vocation that has moved a person to turn their life to teaching in the first place – to sterilise it by declaring it an obstacle to progress, to make it un-relevant.   But this does not fore-decide that we should do likewise.   We are an Academy now.   This means we have the freedom … (oh, ‘to all think along the same lines’, damn, I thought I had a good point there – even the opportunity to pursue a dialogue is now denied me).   In pursuing this ‘reform’ the school is demonstrating its willingness and determination to weed out those who are not ‘like-minded’ (as narrowly and ineffectively defined by the school), quite independent from whether they are good and effective teachers or not.   How ironic, now, that this would be performed under the aegis of what was formally known as ‘professional development’.   This move would simply make it easier to define individual teachers out of their jobs – it would complete the bypassing of the organic, sharing, collegiate creativity that is the craft and art of teaching.

‘FREEDOM … to all think along the same lines’ isn’t this the most oxy-moronic slogan to have been heard?

More and more, a career in teaching feels like life in a cult: the over-riding and rendering-irrelevant of the very basis and reference that formed an individual’s teaching identity in the first place.   If my thought and creativity do not comply with the ‘acceptable’ practice of the organisation I am immediately rendered anathema by the organisation which holds tight to the only means of endorsement of my work and identity: performance management.   My thought and creativity will be banished, excluded, rendered untouchable, polluted, much like the ultimate punishment of early societies – to be banished was to lose your very identity, it would have been far better to have just been killed.

This is not what I came into teaching for and yet I am obliged to have to respond to it.   I am obliged to have to conform in it.   And the proposed streamlining of capability and performance will complete the alienation from my own endeavour in teaching that has been making me ill, now, for the past decade.   How on earth can I be expected to believe that this is in the ‘best interests’ of teachers, let alone pupils or their parents?   When the proposal goes ahead – as it inexorably will – will my objections in this consultation render me ‘incapable’ unless I change them?   And will I then be ‘performance managed’ out of my career?

I will say it now, and I will say it here, (even though it will not have immediate sway over what is happening anyway, but being one in a million who marched on the streets of London in 2003 saying ‘NO’ to Tony Blair obliged him to become so ridiculous in his determination to go to war that it rendered him a liability, I can hope): government-nurtured management of education/schools/teachers is just plain, simple wrong.   This current proposal is the epitome of wrong management, of either people or public service.   It is demotivating.   It is mechanised only to identify the lack (or even just the ‘satisfactory’), it absorbs the good and immediately takes it for granted, rather than seeing how it works and cultivating it.   Teachers work hard now to cover their backs and stay out of hassle rather than culture their practice.   Lazy management just demands over recognising or understanding or nurturing; it doesn’t bother working out how to meet (and therefore manage) the demands itself.   It narrowly pre-defines success criteria – extracting from the whole community that is communication – reducing education to a process rather than a growth.   It practises outcome-led management to the detriment of value-informed practice, and in this way exploits endeavour rather than nurturing it.   Management does not recognise teachers as a resource but as mechanisms (reductio’d ad absurdum) to those imposed outcomes in which they have no investment and in which they had no decision.   Management has become dictatorial and inconsistent and determinedly non-democratic or non-nurturing.   It may be the way the government wants management to be, but it is wrong.   Governments are often wrong.

Am I saying all this simply because of my own experience of being ignored rather than managed during the last decade?   Yes.   Are my words therefore rendered irrelevant because of this?   No.   Unless the way I have been treated was all a very long-running mistake.   And unless the litter of other teachers’ careers I have seen discarded by the roadside, crumpled and shaking, was wrong as well (I have seen teachers with decades of successful experience reduced to ‘satisfactory’ and then retired; I have seen teachers hounded to cure a hastily diagnosed symptom until they became ill and left the profession; I have seen passionate teachers walk out of their career with no forwarding post, during a recession; I have seen teachers shift out of their job to become successful elsewhere where they were listened to; I have seen teacher’s whole legacy rubbished once they were retired; I have seen teachers dis-abled in their career because they hadn’t been practising the sudden advent of a new initiative for years previously; I have seen teachers shifted into teaching wholly different subjects as a reward for evading being made redundant; I hear, every day, the attrition of spirit every time an e-mail is opened).   Wouldn’t it be better for my career if I just shut up and didn’t express my unhappiness and reservations about this ordeal which is my career?   For the decade past, it makes no difference; if this proposal goes ahead: yes.

If I don’t send this, it is because I need to look after my health.   If I do send it, it is because I believed the word ‘consultation’ and because I shouldn’t be thinking only of myself.

(I did send it – it presumably got consulted, although I have not talked to any manager about it.   We hear the results on Monday 16th July – the week we break for the summer holidays.)

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

career wormhole: Child of Illusion
compromise wormhole: really
money & performance & politics & teaching craft wormhole: teaching: which is it going to be, procedure or nurture?
obligation wormhole: the / pyrrhic / play
performance management wormhole: teaching performance
professionalism wormhole: responsible
recognition wormhole: across the room / through the patio doors / through the conservatory windows / at the bottom of the garden / the still bifurcated trunk of / the oak / before the let-grown hair and fringes / of the fir tree / blown every lifetime in a while by the winter sun // actually
teaching art: Resource

 

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teaching performance

16 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by m lewis redford in teaching

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

performance, performance management, philosophy, resource, teaching craft

There is a delicate balance to maintain when walking into the classroom.   In one’s management of interaction during the lesson, just the right amount of humour, adjustment of the teacher’s responses, adjustment of the activity, responses to individual needs and conditions of pupils etc… needs to be finely judged.   The teacher, if s/he is to perform well, needs much more than the lesson preparation, they need the ‘performance’ which delivers the lesson with the sensitive response of a stage performer performing to a diverse audience.   If the teacher does not feel right – if they have travelled between sites, if they have no guaranteed break during the day (the week!), they are required to fulfil many other administrative/educational tasks in no extra time, if their subject is trashed by individuals, or school management or society, if the media has had a recent dump on teachers exasperated that children, yet again, seem out of control and unfit for the economy etc. – their performance will be off, they will mis-read situations, they will miss individual communications, they will over-respond to some and under-respond to others etc.   The teacher is a performer and needs to be nurtured if you want the care that teaching IS delivered.

~~~—‘o’—~~~

misfits’ miscellanysays: Yes, Sir!

mlr says: And don’t let me have to tell you again – I said I want applause when I have taught you a lesson!
misfits’ miscellany says: Listen for sound of one hand clapping.

mlr says: I am humbled

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

performance wormhole: I think I know why I don’t like teaching, even though I quite like teaching and am quite good at it, even if I do have to say so myself
performance management wormhole: Professionalism … in teaching
philosophy wormhole: management and managerialism
resource wormhole: Structural Time
teaching craft wormhole: management and managerialism

 

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Professionalism … in teaching

27 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by m lewis redford in teaching

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

communication, giving, managerialism, OFSTED, performance management, professional development, professionalism, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, stress, teaching craft, workload

Teaching is giving (giving is professionalism).   When I teach I give.   When I present I give vision, I give focus.   When I differentiate, I give a bridge.   When I resource, I give tools.   When I mark work, I give ‘eye contact’ through that work.   When I set targets, I build a shared vision.   When I report, I recognise, I applaud or I care.   When I monitor, I remember.   When I plan, I give a whole world.   When I include, I give patience, I entrust faith.   When I tutor, I give the fence (zen wisdom would say: ‘to control your cow, put her in a large field’; Shunryu Suzuki Roshi).

Professionalism in teaching is not primarily getting reports in on time, it is not getting to lessons on time, it is not getting a certain percentage of my class a higher grade pass, it is not meeting OFSTED criteria.   All of these are effects of my professionalism, not measures to make my professionalism better (as a colleague keeps on saying ‘your pig won’t get fat simply because you keep on weighing it).   When you demand of my professionalism you are doing so outside of the educational interaction that is my day to day practice, and if I have to respond to your demands, my educational interaction is compromised and I am under pressure measured by criteria which are not necessarily requisite to my teaching.

I can only throw together an occasional good homework, inspired and serendipitous, while setting homeworks every week.   I can only inspire one child with a vision for their work while teaching 340 others.   I can only throw un-thought-through medium-term plans out when I am teaching 22 out of 25 periods a week.   I can only think about my teaching with wistfulness and regret when I have to Plan, Differentiate, Assess, Report-on, set Targets, Mark, Monitor, be Inclusive, ensure Equal-opportunity etc.   Take the above as an acronym: PARTIMMED!!!

We cannot do anything well because we can only devote ‘part’ of our ‘time’ to it because we have too much to service on top of teaching.   The experience of this is stress.

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

communication & giving wormhole: Assessment for Learning: the Prologue
managerialism wormhole: Structural Time
performance management wormhole: compromised
professionalism & workload wormhole: the Hothousing of Teaching
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi wormhole: don’t move
teaching craft wormhole: Resource

 

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